During the period of the communist rule Soviet higher education institutions were isolated from the rest of the world. Even academic cooperation with the countries belonging to the socialist bloc was strictly limited. After the fall of the Iron Curtain higher education institutions started to establish relations with their foreign colleagues. During the initial post-socialist period the process was quite spontaneous; eventually it became much more focused. Contrary to what could be expected according to the modernization theory, the former Soviet republics began to move into different directions. For some (the Baltic countries), internationalization essentially meant Westernization. Others (Russia), after a relatively short honeymoon with the West, turned towards the East – India, China, etc. Azerbaijan started to establish close links with Turkey, while Belarus decided to stick to the Soviet model. Instead of the expected convergence, one can observe the process of divergence (Želvys, 2020). The term “internationalization” began to acquire different meanings for different post-Soviet countries.

The situation of Lithuania is quite specific. Student flow definitely moves one direction – from the East to the West. Young people, who are going to study abroad, prefer to choose Western European countries. Most popular destinations are United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark. The largest groups of foreign citizens coming to study in Lithuania are from Ukraine, Belarus and India. ERASMUS+ data for 2014-2022 show that Lithuanian students most often chose to visit Spain, Germany and Italy, while students from Turkey, Latvia and Poland were the largest incoming groups (ŠMPF, 2022). This is in line with the general population migration trends: the most numerous migration flow to Lithuania during the recent years comes from Ukraine, Belarus and Russia (LRV, 2025). School-age children who come from these countries enter Lithuanian general secondary schools.

The one-sided flow evokes a number of challenges for Lithuanian higher education and research:

- The „brain drain“. A certain part of students coming from Lithuania to Western universities choose to stay in the countries of their studies. Students coming to Lithuania from the East do not compensate the loss of the human capital – after graduation they prefer to move to the West of return back to their home countries.

- The language barrier. English is the language of international communication for Lithuanian researchers. Most of academicians who were fluent in Russian have already reached the retirement age. However, colleagues coming for exchange visits from the former Soviet republics expect to communicate in Russian and few of them speak English.

- Disproportion of research publications. Lithuanian researchers prefer to publish in Western journals, while Lithuanian journals are overloaded with papers from the East – especially popular are the ones indexed in WoS and Scopus. Ironically, sometimes publications of the authors from Asian countries dominate in Lithuanian research journals.

- Development of intercultural competences in teacher education and training. Lithuanian higher education institutions learn to adopt methodologies of developing intercultural competences from their colleagues in Western European universities. However, migrants in Western European countries are culturally different from migrants in Lithuania. The majority of migrant children in Lithuanian schools did not come from Africa or Asia; they are mainly Russian-speaking youngsters from the former Soviet republics. Despite certain cultural similarities, their mentality and behavior differs from that of the young generation who grew up in independent democratic Lithuania. The challenge for Lithuanian teacher trainers is to decide to what extent the Western expertise in this respect is applicable to Lithuania.

Universities in Eastern Europe are often regarded as being at a crossroads of political and cultural tensions generated by the internationalization of teaching and research. Increasingly, these crossroads appear to be more discombobulating as many countries in the region face a growing number of geopolitical anxieties related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which escalates security concerns as well as a worldwide competition between democratic and authoritarian regimes. Once a major standoff of the 20th century, the tensions between the East and the West urge intellectuals once again to reconsider the concepts and practices of internationalization in higher education (de Wit and Altbach, 2021), and become more careful in predicting the prospects of cross-border mobility and collaborations.

This panel uses the war in Ukraine as a pivotal point in discussing the concerns about the East-West collaborations and the changing institutional logics of internationalization. The previous studies in the post-Soviet world have indicated a considerable shift in the definitions of easternness in Eastern Europe (Orechova, 2025). The intergration of the post-Soviet Baltic university systems into the European Area of Higher Education has raised concerns about cultural as much as political autonomy of higher education institutions (Kriaučiūnienė & Šlikaitė, 2022; Leišytė, Zelvys & Zenkienė, 2015; Zenkienė & Leišytė, 2024). At the same time, further east in the post-Soviet space, the Russian invasion and subsequent genocidal campaign against Ukraine have generated a new wave of disquietude about the ability of the universities in the region to follow the mainstream route of internationalization as defined by the global literature. The recent studies in the field raised ethical consternations about transnational solidarity that prioritizes commercial interests of the major states, while urging smaller countries to seek multipolar global engagement as a response to the military threats by their larger and more powerful neighbours (Almukhambetova, 2026; Oleksiyenko, Shchepetylnykova & Furiv, 2023; Oleksiyenko, 2025). In Ukraine, the researchers noted an accelerated integration of Western standards by displaced Ukrainian academics and refugee students in view of the national need to build strategic collaborations with democratic countries in order to correct misperceived discourses and practices of the past as well as defend their country from the agressor (Hladchenko, 2025, 2026; Kushnir & Yazgan, 2025; Oleksiyenko, 2023). In Central Asia, scholars have called for de-Russification of the formerly colonized systems of higher education (Hwami, 2024), while following the war-generated movement for epistemic justice in and beyond the post-soviet world (Khylko, 2025).

At the proposed panel, we are planning to present case studies of two universities in Eastern Europe – Vilnius University in Lithuania and the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, and shed more light on internationalization challenges generated by agential and discursive dilemmas of the post-Soviet world during the crises in the region and the world. Through analysis of institutional narratives regarding geopolitical changes, global engagement, national development and security, and cross-border research collaborations, we aim at bringing forward and comparing perspectives on the futures of internationalization at the two major geopolitical actors in Eastern Europe.

The comparative dataset will include bibliographic and bibliometric analysis of international co-authorships of these universities with counterparts in the East and the West. The two cases will engage thematic and content analysis of publications featured in local university presses and internationally peer-reviewed journals. We will also examine reports on geopolitical dilemmas as they are presented by the universities’ academic and social media, including speeches and media exposure of university presidents, deans, and key intellectuals of the two universities. The attention will be given to their interpretations of geopolitical crisis and the roles of universities in mitigating analytical failures caused by compromised security, regional instability and deterioration of international higher learning.

Through comparative analysis of institutional discourses, we will seek opportunities to advance conceptualization of internationalization dilemmas in times of major crises in global higher education at large, and in the regional higher education constructs in particular.